You've Got Q's, We've Got A's — We had a lot of feedback on our architecture update. In the spirit of continued openness and transparency, I'd like to address a number of the questions that came up in the comments on that post. — Donnie asks if we're making a slow exodus from Ruby …

Twitter: Don't blame Ruby, blame Scoble — Micro-messaging site Twitter has gone from zero to transparent in a hurry. That is to say, it has gone from keeping users in the dark during its downtime to explaining the problems it is having in detail. Tonight, developer Alex Payne wrote a Q …

Did China's Hackers Shut Off the Lights? (Updated) — Hackers working on behalf of China's People's Liberation Army have penetrated networks controlling electric power grids in the United States, computer security experts believe. And that may have precipitated a massive blackout …

US probes whether laptop copied on China trip — WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. authorities are investigating whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack …

Google spotlights data center inner workings — SAN FRANCISCO—The inner workings of Google just became a little less secret. — The search colossus has shed only occasional light on its data center operations, but on Wednesday, Google fellow Jeff Dean turned a spotlight on some parts of the operation.

Sources: Apple planning biggest back-to-school promo yet — Apple as early as Monday is expected to announce its 2008 back-to-school promotion, which will encourage students to purchase a new Mac through some of the biggest incentives in the company's history, AppleInsider has learned.

Microsoft's grand plan to eliminate phone numbers — I've been puzzling over transcripts of a couple of recent speeches by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates where he discussed his vision for the end of phone numbers. But it wasn't until today, when I learned more about Microsoft's “Echoes” …

No Way to Build an Operating System — This is no way to build an operating system. Microsoft Watch opines, based on the D6 conference stage show: Windows 7 will ship in 2009, almost certainly in time for holiday PCs. Microsoft disclosed today that there would be no major architectural changes …

MAXroam saves its customers a million dollars. — Well I hope I wont be hanging of a Spanish balcony trying to do a TC50 interview with Michael Arrington this year. — I cant believe its nine months since we nervously launched MAXroam in San Francisco. — Its been a wild ride but its turned out amazingly good.

GooTube — Google is turning YouTube into its own kind of data gold mine. So what if a few founding employees wind up in the dust? — Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) drew sneers when it paid $1.65 billion for YouTube in November 2006. Only 63 people worked at this little video distributor …

Naveen Jain's Latest Scam: Intelius — When serial entrepreneur Naveen Jain left the company he founded, InfoSpace, in disgrace in late 2002, a lot of people thought he would never be trusted by the financial markets again (see this three part series from the Seattle Times that talks extensively …

MediaDefender Behind the Attack on Revision3 — MediaDefender is a company that acts on behalf of other media companies to muck up P2P and file sharing networks. They're the ones seeding BitTorrent with fake files - a tactic they hope will make filesharing appear to be too much of a hassle and therefore not worth the effort.